Master Storyteller or Master Deceiver?

By DINITIA SMITH

Published: August 3, 2002

HE was a spellbinding storyteller, a figure of mesmerizing charm. The South African-born writer Sir Laurens van der Post, who died in 1996 at 90, sold millions of copies of his novels and nonfiction books, including ''The Lost World of the Kalahari,'' about the plight of the South African Bushmen, which became a popular BBC television series.

Van der Post was a Jungian mystic and a spiritual adviser to Prince Charles; according to British newspapers, he taught the prince to talk to his plants. In 1982 Charles made him godfather to his heir, Prince William. Van der Post was also a close friend of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, exerting an influence on her policy in South Africa.

He had a following in the United States as well. For several years, he gave the Advent sermon at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. The year he died, he attended a celebration of his work in Boulder, Colo., and 4,000 people came.

But according to a new biography, ''Teller of Many Tales: The Lives of Laurens van der Post,'' by the British journalist J. D. F. Jones, published here last month by Carroll & Graf, van der Post was a fraud who deceived people about everything from the amount of time he actually spent with the Bushmen to his military record during World War II. His claim that he had brokered the settlement in the Rhodesian civil war was a lie as was his insistence that he was a close friend of Jung's, Mr. Jones says.

And when it came to women, der Post was a bounder. In the early 1950's, when he was 46, he seduced the 14-year-old daughter of a wealthy South African winemaking family, who had been entrusted to his care during a sea voyage. She became pregnant, and although he sent her a small stipend, he never publicly acknowledged the daughter born of the relationship.

''I discovered to my astonishment that not a single word he ever wrote or ever said could necessarily be believed,'' Mr. Jones said in an interview from his home in Somerset, England. ''He was a compulsive fantasist.''

When ''Teller of Many Tales'' was published in Britain last year, under the title ''Storyteller: The Many Lives of Laurens van der Post,'' it created a mini-sensation. The book had a gleeful reception in many British newspapers. The reviewer for The Economist of London called the book ''hilarious.'' The Daily Telegraph said it was ''bold, brilliantly researched and fascinating,'' though a critic for The Spectator dissented, calling it ''an utterly ruthless hatchet job.'' Lucia Crichton-Miller, van der Post's daughter, also offered a passionate defense of her father. ''I think it a profoundly dishonest book,'' she said from London. ''The worst is the malign selection of evidence.''

Mr. Jones knew van der Post slightly, he said, and had been an admirer of his early work. ''You have never in your life met a man so charming,'' he said. ''It was staggering.'' When van der Post was in his late 80's, Mr. Jones proposed writing his biography, but van der Post didn't want one while he was still alive. After his death, Mr. Jones approached Ms. Crichton-Miller, who had been a colleague of his at The Financial Times of London, where he was an editor. Ms. Crichton-Miller agreed to cooperate with him and provided access to her father's archives.

The lies began with the stories of his childhood, Mr. Jones said, in books like ''Venture to the Interior,'' his 1951 best-selling account of his travels in Nyasaland (today Malawi), interwoven with Jungian mysticism. Van der Post claimed descent from minor Dutch aristocracy, and said that his father had been a senior statesman and a high-ranking barrister, a ''kind of prime minister.'' In fact, Mr. Jones says, his father came from a family of minor distinction and was a lower-status law agent who processed routine legal documents.

In ''The Lost World of the Kalahari'' and other writings, van der Post claimed to have had a Bushman, sometimes a half-Bushman, nanny, from whom he derived his special, instinctive knowledge of the group. In fact, Mr. Jones says, there is no record of such a person, and van der Post did not encounter the Bushmen, the indigenous people of South Africa, until he was an adult. He spent about two weeks with them despite assertions that he lived among them. In his writings, van der Post depicted the Bushmen as primitive, instinctual, childlike, whereas white men were logical, reasonable, intellectual. In ''The Lost World of the Kalahari,'' published in 1958, van der Post claimed he had discovered the Bushman paintings of the Tsodilo Hills, when in fact they had been well-known to Europeans for close to 50 years, Mr. Jones writes.

Van der Post also lied to the women in his life, Mr. Jones says. He juggled affairs with numerous women simultaneously, keeping them secret from one another. In 1934, he settled in England with his first wife, Marjorie, and his son, John, on a farm probably bought for him with money from the Queen Mother's cousin Lilian Bowes Lyon, with whom he was having a relationship.